TikTok Growth Hacks for Merchants

Hey 👋

Everything is about TikTok now, and it’s for a few good reasons — fans of your eCom brand advertising for you with UGC, massive organic reach & the potential of going viral.

But what if you could literally “hack” your brand’s growth on TikTok? 🤔 

In today’s post, we’ll cover a case study of how a Gen-Z sex chocolate brand founder made $10M with TikTok Growth Hacks, the most popular growth hacks you can use today, and a way to get the scary AI robots to make UGC for you (and for free) 👀 

Let’s get started 🔥

1. How a Gen-Z Kid “Growth Hacked” To $10M 💰️ 

Oliver Brocato, a 21 y/o eCom wiz grew his sex chocolate brand “Tabs” to ten figures using only TikTok organic. Now we’ve heard similar stories before, but this kid went from 0-100K customers in less than one year, without spending a dollar on ads 🤯 

He shared the 3 Pillars of his TikTok success in a video, but we’ll give them to you straight:

1️⃣ Content Creators

Create multiple brand accounts that you control, and hire content creators to generate content for them. Oliver paid creators a small retainer and around 20% in revenue share — pretty unique, huh? Here’s what he means in a visual:

He invited over 2.1K content creators & micro-influencers to his Discord server (each of them had a YT, IG, and TikTok page) and they all posted content with their own unique angles — and no, these weren’t 10M+ follower influencers that are impossible to reach, they all had a following from as little as 500 to over 50K 👀

2️⃣ Memes

Young people tend to ignore obvious ads, but seeing something hilarious on Instagram reels hits different — Oliver paid popular meme pages on IG to repost his viral TikTok meme UGC with a link to the product for 24hr (it’d only cost $100-$300, with better reach than FB ads 😂)

3️⃣ Micro-Influencers

Finally, Oliver worked with 20K-200K follower influencers to get access to their distribution networks. Focusing on quantity, collabing with many influencers to maximize reach, avoiding overpaying them & letting them create content in their own style is why his brand is as big as it is right now.

P.S — We wrote a guide on finding & working with micro-influencers and setting up a TikTok shop, click here to learn 🔥

2. Only The Best TikTok Growth Hacks 📈 

Anything could be classified as a “growth hack”, but we’ve found 7 strategies that are proven to & can grow your brand (almost all of them are free 🤫):

1️⃣ New TikTok Accounts

Brand-new TikTok accounts are favored by the algorithm — this is the biggest growth hack that Oliver used since he had hundreds of new brand accounts going viral thanks to this TikTok mechanism.

2️⃣ Viral Video Formats

Speeding up your videos to 1.5x-2x, and using a male/female AI (or real) voice can help manage attention better — this largely depends on your target audience.

Superlocal did this, here’s a visual (you can’t hear it, but it’s a female AI voice & it sped up by 2x, showing off their product in use):

3️⃣ Hooks That Stop The Scroll

Having a pattern-breaking hook that stops scrolling & catches attention in under 4 seconds is vital.

4️⃣ Two-Part Videos & Long-form Content

Direct viewers to go to the comments for part 2. Long-form content (<60sec) is also favored by the TikTok algorithm, and using both of these growth hacks at once can show some serious numbers.

5️⃣ Popular Trends & Trending Sounds

Make sure your content is on-trend & relevant to the current TikTok space, be sure to use trending sounds together also (preferably only use trending sounds).

6️⃣ My Video Went Viral

Once your video goes viral, you need to engage as much as possible to maximize your newfound reach. Respond to comments, create video replies, and start a live stream answering questions.

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3. Free AI Growth Hacking with UGC? 🤖 

Not every brand can afford UGC, and even mirroring Oliver’s success can seem daunting (just imagine reaching out to 2.1k content creators 😬).

Luckily we live in an age where creating UGC with AI is possible, and completely free. By the way, just so you know how capable AI is now, what you see below isn’t a real human:

P.S. — If you aren’t familiar with UGC yet, or want to learn about it in simple terms, check out our eCom UGC Guide For Merchants.

Here are the steps to create AI UGC for free (credits go to Andrew Yu):

1️⃣ Get A Video To Generate Off of

You can either record one yourself (the voice & face will be changed by the AI anyway) or take an already well-performing TikTok in your niche and save the video using SnapTik.

2️⃣ Generate a Portrait of Your Target Market

Use Artguru for this — if you’re selling baby shoes, you’d want to generate an avatar of a mom in her 40s, for example. Save this photo!

3️⃣ Face Swap

Now, with Vidnoz, swap the face of the original video or TikTok with the avatar you just saved.

4️⃣ Script & Voice Swap

Make sure you have a script at hand for what you want the AI to say (either write one yourself or use ChatGPT), then go to ElevenLabs, pick a voice of your choice, and paste your script — you’ll have a human-sounding recording.

5️⃣ Lip Sync

You’d want the mouth to match what’s said, right? Go to Sieve and upload your video & AI audio, and it will magically make it match.

❗️ Important — enable the “use_neutral_face” option so it looks less spooky:

6️⃣ Editing

You’re almost there! Now, just use Capcut or any video editor of your choice, and add a video of your product in use.

Then, overlay the AI video on top of it. You can also use Tokcomment so that it looks like the video is a reply to someone’s comment, making it feel more realistic!

If you want to follow along, check out Andrew Yu’s video guide.

That’s that! We’ve shown you how Oliver grew his brand by growth hacking, the best TikTok growth hacks & a way to make UGC completely free by using the newest spooky AI technology 👻 

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Daniil from ECORN